and so this is christmas
by intastella burst
Summary: The sub does not blow up. Juliet and Jack go home. AU, pre 3x-13. I've messed around a bit with the specifics of the canon timeline. Title from John Lennon.


The first thing Jack says when he gets off the sub is "we have to go back." Her tongue is thick and fuzzy with sedative and when she tries to speak, to tell him all the reasons he is wrong, she finds the words are caught, stern blockages in her throat, and a high song-like whinging fills her ears. She is home. _Home_. Oh God--she will be sick with happiness, and the sickness will stain his good intentions and his still-muddy hiking boots, but she won't care. She does not even notice the fragile ease in the way he says "we." She can't care, can't smile, can't say _thank you, thank you for saving me_, can't roll her eyes, ironic, can't listen to his protests, can't do anything but hold onto the shards of joy blanketing the top of her mouth like hot water. If she speaks, if she moves, if she screams as loudly as she wants to, the water will come alive and it will burn her tongue.

It is hard to see in the thick not-winter darkness of L.A.--that is where they are, or where Harry, the submarine pilot, said they are at least, and she has to trust him, she has to--but he has moved to stand beneath a lamppost, and she can see him now, his sunken-in eyes and unsmiling mouth, the corresponding set of his jaw. A lamppost, a gateway to another world. She used to be a reader. Rachel loved Narnia.

"Juliet?"

He looks so forlorn, so bereft without chains to rattle and plates to break. The air--the _real_ air--makes him compress into himself, like an action figure taken from its shrink wrap. It is a silly thought, and it almost makes her giggle. Julian would be about the right age for action figures, wouldn't he? _Julian_. She still hasn't said it aloud.

"We have to go back," he says again, and the words already sound off in his mouth, half-hysterical and too belligerent, like he is trying to make it true by making time, like he has already forgotten why he left in the first place. Or maybe he is just thinking of all the others he left behind; he has fixed her now and the patient has been discharged. She supposes she must make allowances for jet lag. "We have to help them." His eyes dart back and forth from her cheekbones to her filled-in eyes to her bloodied lower lip and pause and hold there, reactionary concern bringing his eyebrows down in a well-traversed sweep. She must have chewed the skin off in her orange-flavored dreams. There is a fierceness in the set of his neck that is all too familiar. Her heart wings and spins in her tight chest and her face blossoms nonchalance, a too-ripe flower.

_I have to help myself, Jack,_ she thinks but does not quite say; that would be mean. She _is_ mean, and evil, and a bad guy, though, and she shot a man the day after she told him she wasn't accustomed to death. She almost wishes he didn't know these things about her. She almost wishes she could say "Sarah" again--or would Kate do just as well, now that she is un-fixable, too?--and send him to his knees, bend him to her will, make him eat the sandwich. His eyes crinkle at her, guileless.

She sighs, a raw, choked sound; he won't stop looking, and the darkness does not abate the weary intensity in his eyes. The joy has evaporated from her half-smile and all that is left is the sickness, coating the walls of her mouth like a subtle mold. But she has to speak--if she doesn't he will ask her if she is okay and her bags will be packed for her even before she can get a fresh change of clothes. She presses her lips together. Her bones ache for her family and the flowers of Miami, and Jack is missing his in a less compartmentalized way, his dirt-encrusted family of misfits sitting on that endless beach; he misses the sun-salty power and the conditional gunfights and the mango swaps. They are the same, again. Their goals are different but similarly selfish.

"Let's get some sleep," she says, finally, and her thinning hair falls in her face as she turns to grab her bag. He sighs, as if disappointed. How anticlimactic. _That's it?_ Her bag is twice as heavy as the suitcase she took to the island three years ago.

Jack lets her walk about five feet into the future before she feels his breath down her collar and his hand gently easing the bag away. His knuckles knock against hers like small stones. "You don't have to do that," he mutters, and for a moment she forgets that he is not hers. He swings the bag over his shoulder and she smiles, teeth half-showing; now what will she do with her hands?

-

She gets them a hotel room with the money Ben gave her. It seems to tinge her fingers a tainted green as she pays the concierge--but that is too nice a name for this bent-over ex-bellhop watching them and the marked distance between their bodies with circuit-camera eyes, eyes that are dusky with age and boredom and make her think of death. Receptionist? Too posh. She gives him a few dollars too much and flushes unnecessarily as he counts her change out bill by bill--she forgot how to calculate sometime in the last twenty-four months or hours.

The money. _A parting gift_, Ben said. _Buy yourself something nice_, like her father, when he used to give her two dollars and a kiss on the cheek at the weekend's end. There is a vaguely wilted plastic Christmas tree stuffed in the corner between desk and wall; the adorning paper chains look old, several months, at least. She wonders if the management even bothered taking it down last year, or if they just decided to leave it up through the air-conditioned summer and into the fall and before they knew it it was December, December 23, and too late for new decorations, too late to make an effort, and all there was to do was wait another year. She wonders a lot of things--everything except why she insists on fabricating speculatory backstories for insignificant things like plastic trees. Harper would call this displacement.

The soft, pseudo-homey lighting of the lobby makes them look strange, and she looks at their rumpled and mussed and heathenish reflections in the obligatory distorted mirror beneath the hotel logo. They look like exactly the sort of people who carry enough cash for twenty hotel rooms over without even the dignity of a wallet, exactly like the sort of strangers her mother meant when she said to never talk to them. Jack's eyes bore brand-colored holes into her neck with a puzzled irritation. He doesn't understand why she hasn't given him an answer. He thinks that he will be able to bring them back to the island with help and helicopters and guns by force of sheer will. He kept his promise--he got her off the island--but he needs her, like she needed him, and if she refuses it will needle her brains out along with her heart. Reciprocity. That is the price of being important to him; to anyone, but mostly to him. (But at least she is _important_.)

The lights flicker like dying things and the receptionist--the clerk, there it is, the clerk--swears, once, then twice; with the lights out she can taste the Lysol on the counter and feel the new dust settling on their heads from the chandelier and smell the left-behind coffee cups crammed in the garbage bin. Jack puts his hand on her back, just above her mark; ruined nerve endings send imaginary sparks of a free-wheeling awareness up and down her spine and then up again. She waits for the lights go back on with a too-placid smile and tears of unreasonable terror ruining her night vision. When they do Jack's hand darts away, into his pocket. His grin is shy and her stomach is shivering in odd ways. Damn it, says the clerk, slapping his palm down on hardwood. The clock strikes twelve--there is no spell. There never was.

They sleep well that night, she on the bed, curled up beneath the comforter but over the sheet, and he on the pull-out sofa. In her dreams, the submarine is on fire and the petroleum gets on her hands; he hugs her, shielding her from the blast, and the oil smears his shirt. She feels the explosion deep in her bones.

When she wakes up he is shower-clean and maybe a little bit closer to rational, a little less driven by fear than she remembers. "Let's do this," he says, well-meaning, after she has stretched the sleep from her muscles. She doesn't have to ask what.

-

They eat breakfast in a diner. (He doesn't want to stop, but she just looks at him--_we still have to eat, Jack_--and he gives in with a sheepish nod.) She spends five dollars on the jukebox, on schmaltzy Christmas carols and ballads and Petula Clark. She laughs and Jack looks happy, happy for her, at least. He doesn't even fight her when she tells him that she is going home to her sister for Christmas. He nods and looks down into his coffee cup until she grabs his hand across the table and makes him make eye contact. The bones and muscles in his hand flutter beneath the soft skin of her palm. "After. We'll go back for them after." He nods and bites his lip, and after they've finished goes to buy two tickets to Miami. When the plane takes off she hears the wheels scream beneath their feet.


End file.
